Geeseman gestured to two men who looked like they had been sent by a movie studio casting department to play computer hackers. Rosofsky was the plump one, Pearl the emaciated pale one, each wearing jeans, T-shirts, and shy smiles. No eye contact.

“They are here from the NSA to analyze and catalog computer drives, CDs, anything digital that had been within bin Laden’s reach.” Geeseman looked up. “As you know, I am Dennis Geeseman with the FBI. I’m going to supervise and float where you need me. I’ve got passable Arabic, Fisk, so if you get behind I can help. Here’s how this is going to work. We’ve got no clerical in the bunker, no support staff at all. You’ll each be logging your own findings on the laptops. Anderson and Storch over there”—Geeseman indicated a pair of uniformed air force enlisted men standing against the back wall—“will assist your commo and tech. We will flash to Fort Meade and Langley if we get anything urgent, through the signal intelligence station on the other side of the base. We have transportation outside for hand-carrying outgoing messages. There are no lines in or out of the bunker for this job. We’re sealed in tight, for obvious reasons.

“You’re looking for anything hot, anything unexpected, any hard intel such as names, locations, dates, or lists,” said Geeseman—repeating their dispatch briefings for effect. There was no such thing as too much communication, a fact he had learned the hard way. “Basically anything that might lead us to any outstanding, still-active plots. We don’t know what we’re getting vis-à-vis code work. We’re not expecting to find a laundry list of terrorist agents in place or senior Al-Qaeda leadership, of course . . . but then again, stranger things have happened. Lots of eyes and ears will be on this stuff for weeks and weeks, but we are the first ones to unwrap this present. This is hour one. Let’s make absolutely sure we don’t let something timely and obvious slip through our fingers. If so, we’ll all feel shitty a few weeks from now. Remember, a quick revenge strike is not out of the question. These guys are epic grudge holders, and we just pissed them off royally.

“We’re going to be here for two days minimum, maybe twice that. They have rooms for everyone over at the bachelor officers’ quarters if you want to sleep. There will be vehicles outside the bunker when you need them. We’re bringing in food, but if you want something different, it doesn’t hurt to ask. These guys love any excuse to run out to Kaiserslautern, and if it’s exotic but feasible, we will have airmen outside in the morning to fetch whatever you need. It’s only seven in the evening where we came from, so I assume everybody wants to get going right away. Questions?”

“How do we sort the stuff?” Cadogan asked, dropping the formality of a briefing into a conversational tone. “And who gets what first?”

“This is not a race, please keep that in mind. The containers were marked and numbered by the follow-up team after the SEALs got his body out of there. So we have rough categories with best-guess labels. You will see numbers that correspond to the lading inventory that each of you will be issued inside the bunker. The SEALs grabbed obvious discs, drives, and computers. Those are clearly identified in their containers, so Rosofsky and Pearl, you’re all set to start there. We got a lot of random debris from a trash-burning pit in the compound, so Bonner, maybe you want to grab that. We may get lucky with some genetic material. Maybe a little hard copy. For the rest, just take what looks like it might fall into your areas of examination. If, once you get it open, you change your mind, feel free to pass it on—just please make sure it goes to the right person. Don’t concern yourselves with chain of custody—that’s for those who will come after us.”

Chapter 11

The residual adrenaline rush of dashing for the Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt and the chopper to Ramstein, and the wild exhilaration following bin Laden’s death, kept everyone going inside the bunker. They were a dream team of detective skill and talent, the best in the country at what they did, but at first they couldn’t help sounding like a bunch of kids playing Clue. Every few minutes, another exclamation of discovery or surprise broke the steady drone of the air-conditioning fans.

“Oh, baby, will you look at this,” said Elliott, holding up a black diary bound by a simple elastic band. “He had a fucking Day-Timer. A Day-Timer. My mom had one of these.” He plucked off the band, turning the pages. “The marks in it aren’t a language, but the cryppies at Meade should have a field day with this.”

Off to the copy machine it went.

A few minutes later: “One of his wives shopped in Thailand within the past few months—or got this from somebody who did,” chirped Cadogan, holding up an ivory-colored silk undershirt. “The label is brand new, no dye stains from washing. Now how the hell did they get her there and back?”

Bonner, working silently, took smears, chips, and samples from glassware, food cans, serving utensils, hair combs, lumpy remnants of bar soap, and the contents of two small plastic bathroom garbage pails. Joining the excitement, she at one point blurted, “I’ve got blood, I’ve got semen, I’ve got hair. There is so much here that, once we sort it out and get exemplars, we’ll have positive biological IDs on everybody who ever set foot in the place.”

Rosofsky and Pearl worked at back-to-back computers. As they moused and clicked and typed, they vented the intensity of their concentration by talking mindless, dependable smack about seventh-generation video game consoles, the Nintendo Wii versus PlayStation 3. The first few flash drives they cloned gave them the general picture. Pre-takedown surveillance had found that bin Laden’s house had no electronic link to the outside world, incoming or outgoing. He depended on a courier to bring in news, field reports, and amusement.

But he had to have some way to issue his commands to Al-Qaeda cells, as well as receiving outside intelligence. After ten years of looking for bin Laden, one thing his trackers had long ago confirmed was that he paid close attention to the details of plans all over the world. This included the London subway attack, USS Cole, and the first World Trade Center bombing. So the team was primed to look for portable, disposable media that could port into and out of any computer or modern electronic display.

Rosofsky and Pearl scanned the CDs and flash drives for the obvious. Timetables, maps, names. Anything that could help them later when they proceeded into more complex digital terrain.

They skimmed downloaded news broadcasts, many of them featuring OBL himself delivering his pronouncements after attacks. They found a folder containing practice tirades, what was essentially a terrorist blooper reel. There were a few random documents in the mix, some of them text files, some PDF scans of handwritten pages, but nothing obviously juicy. Fisk and Geeseman were passed the Arabic documents and read what they could. They were data compilations on dozens of cities, much of it copied verbatim from sources such as the CIA World Factbook and Wikipedia, like terroristic book reports.

None of it alluded to a specific attack or target—nor did they expect it to. Any intel acquired so easily would be immediately suspect.

They skimmed through entire two- and three-year-old issues of Time, The Economist, the New York Times, the London Times, The New Yorker, Wired, and USA Today. They were looking specifically for any breaks in formatting, any edits within the text—any hidden transmissions.

After working for a few hours without anything to show for it, they set all that aside. Pearl opened a new folder on his screen. “It’s got to be in the pictures,” he muttered.